"This is it," said Meg Burns, balancing surefootedly on a pinnacle of rock. The dog scurried about the brush in the forest behind them and started nothing but birds.
Merritt looked down where the water boiled white far beneath them, and up to the valley which had been invisible from the point at Burns' Station.
The crest on which the station stood and this narrows where they now were formed a natural barrier between two great valleys. A dam was indeed possible here, at least by first sight. The eastern valley would be destroyed, almost totally inundated up to the steep slopes of its wooded mountains, but men on Hestia had a great deal of land from which to choose. Now it was a glory of autumn colors, of rock spires and tall conifers.
"It's a shame to do it," he said, looking about him, "but I suppose there's not much other choice, even granted we could get a boat up past that narrows…"
"There's rocks," said Meg. "We had an accident back a few years ago when we were trying to build on our own: one of the boats hit a rock and blew up. The boiler exploded and everyone aboard was killed. Twenty people. I don't think you could ever talk Amos into going up to the edge of that. Besides, the high valley is full of troubles. It's not a pleasant kind of place at all, and you wouldn't get men to carry supplies across it.”
"It's some country, all right." Merritt cast a look eastward, where the tops of trees lay like a mottled carpet as far as the mountain-skirts, a bluegreen and orange expanse cut by the veinwork of streams and the river itself. There came no sound but the distant rush of water and the wind sighing through the leaves… the occasional rustle of the brown dog which accompanied them and coursed off on her own business in the thickets.
"Lonely," said Meg after a moment "Is it like Earth? Is it anything the same?"
It struck him with an eerie feeling, that this Hestian would have to ask: a century removed from the mother-world, they had all a slightly separate accent and named with earthly names things which were only superficially like their earthly counterparts—having forgotten, perhaps, the original. The colonial program had birthed something it perhaps had not planned: a generation of men who had no understanding of Earth.
"It's like," he said, '"or it used to be. There's little wild land left there now."
She looked at him with the hint of a frown. "You must think we're very backward."
"I've no complaints."
"Why would you have come out here?"
The governor persuaded me."
"But why all this way to Hestia in the first place? It's a long way to come, for the sake of strangers."
"Well, my reasons seven years ago were different from those that got me upriver, and maybe after a little while my reasons will change again."
She gave him a sideward glance, settled on a faint smile. The light red-brown of her hair and the flush of her cheeks and the slight freckling from the sun were the colors of Hestia itself. He had not thought her strikingly beautiful when he first saw her: it was like something he had privately discovered, in the sun and the slight crinkling of a smile. He wondered her age: nineteen, twenty, perhaps; and whether she knew what effect she had on a lonely man.
"We ought to get back," she said, suddenly breaking away from his eyes, and clapped her hands to call the dog. "My dad will worry if we're gone out here too long. They'll be sending searchers out."
"You don't take walks much, I take it."
"No, oh, no," she said, and bent to clear a branch. "We're still within reach of home right now, but just at the foot of the rocks down there, that's where the Upriver starts. That's the end of it. That's the line we never cross."
The sleeping house was quiet, no light showing under the crack of the door. Merritt lay stone-still a moment, at last lifted his head from the pillow, plagued by the indefinable sensation of having heard or felt something. There were noises, but only the expected ones, boards giving with the weather, the sighing of wind at the window, something that went bump in time with the gusts.
A dog barked, suddenly, hysterically; and sheep and cattle outside surged against their pens, bleating and bawling in wild panic. Steps crossed downstairs at a run and someone took a clapper to a metal pan and started beating on it. It rang like doomsday and Merritt came out of bed wide awake now, scrambling for his clothes and his boots and his gun.
He reached the balcony of the main room armed and half dressed at the same instant as Porter and Meg and some of he other residents. Merritt followed them, scrambling downstairs with others coming behind and more assembling out of the downstairs wings, men and women in night-dress scurrying about checking bolts and bars.
"Hey!" someone yelled at Merritt. "You got your window closed and bolted?"
"Yes," he called back.
"One of you girls double-check those upstairs windows in the hall," Burns shouted. "Hey, Amos—where do you think you're going?"
Amos Selby was struggling into his coat, and Jim likewise, already heading for the door. "I got my ship down there," Amos said, "and I got too much at stake with it to sit up here."
Jim was with his father as he unbarred the main door and ran; and Merritt hesitated in confusion what the threat might be. But he was certain that he had in his own modern gun a far more effective weapon than the two Hestians carried, and that Amos and Jim were doing something rash. He snatched someone's coat from the peg and ran out after them into the dark yard, trying to overtake them both before they could leave the security of the walls. Someone behind them was cursing all of them and ordering him to stop, whether from anger at the coat or from fear; he heard men running after them.
Amos reached the main gate and hauled up the securing bar, let himself and Jim through to the outside, and it was there that Merritt overtook them and the Porters caught up with all of them from behind. There was a view of the river from the gate, with the steps lacing back and forth down the steep face of the hill; and the first thing evident was that Celestine was free of her cables and headed downcurrent sideways.
Amos cursed under his breath and started running—old man that he was, he could run; and headed off the slanting side of the promontory across the grassy descent toward the trees and the bending of the river.
Merritt saw what he was trying to do, in overtaking Celestine; but the course was going to take them through brushy areas and past a dozen opportunities for ambush, and the current was faster than they could possibly run.
Jim came in at a tangent and skidded downslope, cutting ahead by a little, lost for the moment in brush.
"It's no good," Merritt yelled after them in despair. "Give her up. It's no good killing yourself."
Amos paid him no heed, ran stumbling onward until he could go no farther and pulled up holding his chest; but Jim kept going.
"You got a gun," Amos gasped when Merritt stopped for him. "You stay with my boy. He hasn't"
Merritt hurled himself off then, trying to overtake Jim; Porter was close with him, though some of the others had stopped for Amos. Jim stayed ahead, a Sitting shadow in the brush, refusing their cries to stop.
The river broke sharply to the left just ahead: and Celestine had stopped. They came on her aground on a bar, her dark bulk discernible against the moonlit water.
Jim stopped among the saplings on the shore; Merritt overtook him, and so did Porter and his men. "She's not bad," Jim said, and began stripping out of his coat "I'll get out to her."
"Hold it, boy," Porter said. "No telling what you might meet aboard."
"Somebody's got to get out to her," said Jim. "I'll make it all right, and the People never yet went around machinery. I'll start her up and see if I can't work her off that bar."
"You be careful, boy," Porter said.
"Yes, sir." Jim handed Merrill his coat; and Merrill tried to shape some objection, but none would organize itself: he knew the rivermen too well. It was their life and livelihood sitting out there; and it belonged lo Amos, and Jim, half a son, could not lose it.
A slender figure in the moonlight, Jim stepped down to water's edge and tried the temperature of it, bent over a few moments to get his wind before attempting it. Then he stepped off into the black waters and went in up to his waist.
Gingerly he waded out, not yet having to swim. Once, twice, the dark spot in the water that was Jim's head went out of sight, then reappeared; he was swimming now, fighting the current
Amos joined them, helped along through the brush by one of Porter's kin, and shook his way free to come down to the bank to watch.
"Jim'll get her," said Porter softly. "Don't worry, Amos. We got her now."
"You think I worry about her more than for my boy?" Amos returned shortly, and then kept quiet and watched, for Jim had reached the boat and disappeared into the shadow. There was a murmur of anxiety on the bank. Then Jim reappeared, clambering up the cable by the stern; and there was a general exhaling of breath among the group on the shore.
Time passed. There was no sound from the boat. No one spoke or cracked a twig.
"I'll get her started," Jim's voice called back suddenly. "But I'm afraid it may not be enough to get her off. She's riding too steady to be much adrift."
"You be careful out there, boy," Amos shouted. "Are you alone on that boat?"
"Yes, sir, far as I can tell, I am. Don't worry. If need be, I can ride her out til dawn and we can get some men out here. If she breaks free again, so much the better. I think her bottom's sound."
"Did she break or was she cut?" Porter called out
"She was cut," Jim replied.
The engine started, but it was as Jim feared. She could not quite drag herself free. Cable had to be carried ashore and back again, and it was well after dawn before Celestine could finally winch herself off the bar and into clear water.
It was cold, killing work. At last, with Celestine freed and chugging her deliberate way back upriver to the dock, the crew on the bank started back for the station uphill, blind with exhaustion and half-frozen. There was talk of nothing but dry clothes and breakfast and sleep, in that order, and Merritt flexed skin-stripped palms and agreed with them; there was no feeling in his feet and more than enough in his back, but it was salve to his aches when one of the Porters clapped him on the shoulder and allowed that he was due a drink when they all caught their breath.
They were staggering when they reached the crest, where Burns and his folk held the open gate.
"We just about lost her," Porter said to Burns, when they reached that security, and looked down the height, where the boat was slowly putting in to dock.
Burns gave a long breath, a jerk of his head to the way below. "Earthman—you come down to the dockside. There's something I want to show you."
Merritt opened his mouth to protest, indignant at being turned from the gate. He was too tired even to contemplate climbing steps down and up again; but having won the boat back and being one with these folk set him in a biddable mood .-. . and it was too late: Burns was on his way without pausing for his opinions.
He followed, on numb feet and shuddering knees. At the bottom of the steps Burns waited for him to catch his breath, and waited for him again a short distance farther, off the boards and where the clay of the bank was soft with moisture.
"There," Burns said, pointing down. "There. Have a look, friend, and learn what we've been talking about when we say we don't go into the Upriver. Many a one I've seen, but none quite so clear and plain."
Printed deep in the rain-soft clay, as one would lean against that bank to catch balance in descending, was the print of a long-fingered hand, a hand with an opposable thumb, but with bones too elongate to belong to man or woman or child. A few yards below, at the end of a sliding mark, was a footprint of the same proportions as the hand and toed like a man's.
The prints continued downslope toward the floating dock, where severed ropes were still looped about the moorings, and a handful of Burnses were ready to receive cable from Celestine.